Map Page

I must be honest and admit that I cheated for this week's Documented Life Project page. I simply don't have the time at the moment to spend a day making a page so I chose the easy option and selected to use something I already had. I used to make a lot of fabric paper collages (see a full tutorial on how I do mine on a very early blog post here). They seem to be very popular again at the moment.  I knew vaguely that on one of them I had a map of Paris featured and as maps were our task for this week 47 I opened the box with left over pieces and found it. It had been kept as I couldn't bring myself to cut it up because I liked it so much, but as good luck would have it the piece I liked specially was just about the size of my planner (5 x 7"). So I cut it to size and liked it even better.

It has been made using a vintage street map of Paris, and a wide variety of paper napkins also featuring French themes as well as vintage French text. I only added a few other items to the mix, starting with the vintage text of "My country" (even though France isn't that, it somehow seemed to fit).

I also added the Polish (why not?!) postage stamp, mainly because that particular corner of the collage was quite dark and that brightened it up perfectly as well as providing a balance for the white of the text. I then edged the piece with a gold marker and called it done. This is also the very first page in my planner with a horizontal orientation.

For this year I haven't spend longer than maybe half a day on each page. I expect to dedicate more time to this project next year because first of all the journal we're using is much larger (A4 size) but also because I want to take it a bit more seriously, specially seeing how many ideas even the pages I made this year have given me. I will be making the pages next year over the course of an entire week, spending a bit of time every day. I might even make some pages in fabric. All this of course depends on how much time I have available in among many other projects. I always have to laugh when classes or books tell you that if you only spend 1/2 hour, 20 minutes or whatever small amount of time, on it every day,  you will get a lot done. If I count up all the things I want to learn and add up those small amounts of time they will take I am faced with the fact that there won't be any time left to sleep or even breathe. So somehow I try and fit in as much as is humanly possible given the fact that a day only has so many hours and I have only 2 hands (a serious human design fault!). Somehow a balance has to be found and most of the time that seems to happen but there are periods when I simply have to put the brakes on certain of my activities.

Of course having looked through my box of left over fabric paper collages I now want to make more! And this afternoon I'm going to do some fabric dying! It's all so much fun and I cannot resist.